The Heart Heist (17 page)

As he walked up the porch steps, he figured that at best he would only make a fool out of himself tonight. At worst -- well, he didn't want to think about the worst. Gary took a deep breath and knocked on the front door. If he could only skate by without exposing his true identity --

A very small woman opened the door. Her hair was a pure and snowy white, piled high on her head in a turban-like manner. Her eyes were a vivid green and they fastened on Gary in such a way that he was sure she'd instantly discovered his every last secret.

He braced himself for he knew not what -- confrontation, accusation, condemnation.

Then the woman smiled. Her face transformed, all of the fine wrinkles curving upward and a sort of brilliance glowing out of her. Gary recognized that illuminating glow. Kerrin could get it when she smiled, too.

"Why, hello! You must be Gary Sullivan. Well, don't stand there on the doorstep. Come in, come in! I'm Allyce, by the way, Kerrin and Matt's mother. Though I'm sure you've figured that out by now. For heaven's sake, my dear, come inside."

The older woman gave Gary very little choice in the matter, fastening her hand on his jacket with surprising strength and practically dragging him through the door.

"Let me take that for you," Allyce Horton said, immediately beginning to pull on his sport jacket. She made him do a neat trick juggling the paper bag with the bottle in order to avoid having the jacket hopelessly stuck around it.

"That's wine," Gary told her.

"Yes, I know that." She exhibited no interest in relieving him of the package. Instead she kept hold of his forearm and looked into his face with a great and steady concentration. "You lift weights, just like my boy, Matt." She cocked her head. "Though I detect the result of some actual hard labor here. Let's see, there's Southern European in the cheekbones -- Italian, my guess. Something Mediterranean, though not much, in the thickness of your hair. And the rest, well, my best estimate would be Germanic. Nothing Celtic whatsoever. Where'd you get a name like Sullivan?"

Gary was so bemused by this intimate analysis that he blurted out the truth. "I have no idea." Wherever Kerrin got her diffidence, it certainly wasn't from this woman.

"Not raised by birth parents, then?"

"No." Nor much by any kind of parents, but he let that one go. "Can you really tell all of that -- Italian, Germanic and the rest?" He'd always assumed his origins to be forever lost in fog. In fact, he hardly considered himself to have been born. He thought the verb "discarded" more accurate.

"Oh yes, I'm quite an expert at ethnological analysis." Allyce nodded with no modesty whatsoever. "It's a hobby of mine." Her eyes lit. "Phrenology's another one. You'd be amazed what the bumps on a person's head can tell me about them. Now, you, for instance, would make a fascinating study, I'm sure..."

Gary took a step back, positive he didn't want this woman anywhere near the bumps on his head. "The wine," he insisted, shoving the package into her hands. So much for proper protocol.

But Allyce Horton accepted the package, unperturbed. "How terribly thoughtful of you. Tom does love wine."

Gary mentally sighed with relief. He'd managed to do at least one thing right then. But his stomach didn't do much unwinding action. He had a long way to go before the evening was over.

"Mom? Mom! Where are you?" Kerrin's voice came from around one of the redwood half-walls that partitioned the large area of the house under the high, wood-beamed roof. The next instant Kerrin herself appeared, carrying a metal bowl in one hand, while stirring whatever was inside of it with the other. She looked delightfully disarrayed, with her light cotton blouse pulled half out of her jeans and her hair falling all over the place in its customary curly chaos.

Their eyes met across the expanse of the room. As usual, it was like a five thousand volt hit of electricity. Thinking back, Gary tried to remember if any other woman had affected him this way. When he'd got out of Soledad after his first, two-year stint in the joint, he'd thought all women, indiscriminately, looked delicious. But this was something different, something a hell of a lot more powerful. Maybe it was the aura of innocence that always surrounded her. It was as if by getting closer to Kerrin Gary might be able to steal a little of that purity for himself.

Stealing
. The very idea brought him up short. Was that what this infatuation was about?

"Oh, you're here already, Gary?" Kerrin spared him a remarkably brief smile and immediately turned her attention to her mother. "Mom, just how un-lumpy does this mixture have to get? No matter what I do there are these -- well, it's all going to get baked, anyway, isn't it?" She gave her mother a hopeful look.

Allyce heaved a gentle sigh. "Come on back into the kitchen, my dear, and we'll have a look." She glanced over her shoulder toward Gary with a friendly smile. "Please, make yourself at home, Mr. Sullivan. Why don't you go find Matt? I think he's in his bedroom down the hall." She gestured to the left, innocently giving Gary the run of her well-appointed house.

It was a peach, from a professional point of view. Gary took in the expensive video and stereo equipment in the living room as he strolled toward the hall. All very saleable. And yet he hadn't the slightest desire to abscond with any of it. This was an odd phenomenon he'd been discovering over the past several days as he'd gotten to know more people in town. There was absolutely no compulsion to steal from someone he knew personally. Quite the opposite. A personal knowledge made the very idea close to repulsive.

And yet, he still wanted to steal from Kerrin, apparently. The more he knew her, the more he wanted to own the brilliant warmth she could send him with a smile. He wanted to possess the soft sweetness he'd once held in his arms. She owned an elusive, emotional vulnerability that he wanted to have and keep right close by him.

Matt's bedroom wasn't hard to find. It was the one with the giant posters wallpapering the redwood panels. A seven-foot man leaped in the air to drop a basketball through a hoop. Another man, the size of a refrigerator, plowed through a scrimmage line, a football tucked under his arm. The room looked, Gary guessed, like the typical bedroom of a kid from a normal family. Just a guess, because he didn't have any personal knowledge of what such a bedroom would look like. He'd usually shared his living quarters with several other 'siblings,' and mostly in some part of a house not normally used for sleeping.

Matt, who'd been writing at a desk, stopped as soon as Gary appeared at the door. He hastily closed his notebook and glanced over at Gary with a guilty air. "D'you see Kerrin?"

"Briefly."

Matt's eyes flicked to the side. "She didn't, uh, appear to be doing anything in the kitchen, did she? Anything, you know, that might have to do with dinner?"

Gary leaned against the wall by the door. "Well, now that you mention it, she seemed to be making batter or something like that."

Matt closed his eyes in an image of pain. "Oh, God."

"Something wrong?"

Matt opened his eyes again and considered Gary carefully. "I might as well tell you, seeing as how you'll find out for yourself anyways -- Kerrin can't cook worth beans."

A smile kicked up one corner of Gary's mouth. "You don't say."

"Take my advice. Stick to the cold stuff. Salad, things like that."

"You think that'll work?" Gary was thoughtful. "Seems to me she would notice."

"Nah. With you here she'll be too nervous to see a thing."

Gary didn't know if he wanted to have quite this effect on Kerrin. He'd thought the woman's skittishness had been because of his unsavory past. But after what Matt had told him while fishing, about how Kerrin was this nervous with any man, he was starting to wonder. What he was wondering was not making him very happy. A bad experience with a man could make a woman act the way Kerrin did, and Gary sure as hell didn't want Kerrin to have been through anything like that.

Now he straightened from the wall and took a pace further into the room. "Nice posters," he commented, hoping that would do. He'd been so long out of touch that he didn't know the names of any of the figures Matt had on the wall.

"You ever go out for sports?" Matt asked.

Gary shook his head, but at the same time he remembered that one, almost good summer when he'd been fourteen and played in Little League. That foster family had been all right, but by then his bad habits had already developed beyond the point of control. He'd ruined the whole thing and been sent back to the Home.

"I'd probably have gone out for baseball," Matt said, as though reading Gary's mind. "If it hadn't been for the accident. Or maybe basketball."

There was a wistfulness in the kid's expression that Gary knew well. The "if only"s. If only I hadn't been such an idiot. If only I could have acted with a drop of common sense. Gary found himself sitting on the edge of Matt's brightly colored bedspread. "What kind of accident was it, anyway?"

Matt hesitated. "Really dumb."

Gary leaned back on his hands. "Most are." He waited, not about to ask, but making it clear he'd listen.

Matt kept staring at the basketball player. He licked his lips. "Well, if you must know, I climbed on top of the roof of Mr. Miller's barn. To get a...cat."

Mentally, Gary frowned at Matt's hesitation. He was lying about something.

"To tell you the truth," Matt went on, "it wasn't the first harebrained thing like that I ever did. I was pretty much asking for it."

"So you fell off the roof."

"Uh huh. It was really steep. Once I lost my balance and started sliding down the slope I was going too fast to get a grip on the rain gutter as I went past. It was about twenty feet from there to the ground. Messed up my spine and my hips. The cat," Matt added dryly, "didn't make it."

Again, Gary got the impression of an evasion, that he wasn't hearing the whole truth. Perhaps a half-truth was the only way Matt could bring himself to talk about the accident at all.

Gary could relate. He knew the kind of self-castigation a person could go through, the feelings of disgust at one's own idiotic behavior. And he knew Matt didn't want consolation. "Sounds like a real boner, all right."

Matt gave a humorless laugh. "So what else could I expect -- " He gestured to his wheelchair, "after doing something that stupid?"

Gary's agreeableness vanished. "You think you
deserved
to be paralyzed?"

"Well, yeah. It's called 'consequences,' ya know."

"But it doesn't work like
that
." Gary stood up from the bed and took a restless pace toward the window. "Hell, Matt, if I had a physical injury for every idiot thing I've done in my life -- well, if I weren't already dead by now I'd be one of those vegetables in the hospital."

Matt gave him a severe look. "Everybody has to pay the consequences of their actions." He tilted his head. "And I'll bet you've paid for your mistakes, too, one way or another."

Direct hit. Gary didn't have a word to say in reply. And yet there was something in Matt's pronouncement he couldn't make himself accept. It was too hard, too inflexible. Wasn't there some forgiveness and mercy in the world? If not for himself, then for
some
body -- this utterly innocent kid, for example?

There was a knock on the open door and Gary turned to see Kerrin standing there.

"Dinner in about five minutes, guys. Oh and Gary, I have something for you. You left so fast this afternoon I didn't have a chance to hand it to you after class." Kerrin held out an envelope.

Gary took a long moment to make up his mind to take the thing out of her hand. He was regarding the envelope, Kerrin thought, as though it were a bomb. He turned it over and frowned sternly at his name showing through the cut window in front.

"What is it?"

He could open the envelope and find out for himself. Wondering why he didn’t, Kerrin shrugged. "It's your paycheck."

Gary went absolutely still. His gaze fixed on the envelope with his name on it. In that frozen moment Kerrin suddenly understood. Gary had never received such a thing in his life. Nobody had ever paid him a dime. Two hands seemed to take hold of her heart and twist it like a wet rag. It was his own fault, she tried to tell herself, if he'd never worked an honest job. But logic didn't have anything to do with the way her heart was acting.

Slowly he raised his eyes. "My paycheck," he repeated woodenly.

"Better stick it in the bank fast," Matt quipped, "before Kerrie runs the account into the red again."

Gary shot an alarmed glance at Matt while Kerrin felt color rush to her face. "That was a mere clerical error," she reminded Matt. "Just an itsy bitsy overdraft which happened only once and got taken care of right away."

"Oh, an itsy, bitsy overdraft," Matt crowed, obviously enjoying Kerrin's discomfiture.

Meanwhile, Gary stepped closer to Kerrin. "We have to talk."

"I couldn't agree more," Kerrin murmured back.

He pulled her out of Matt's room. She stood for a moment beside him in the hall, wondering where they could be assured some privacy.

"Where's your room?" Gary asked, looking up the hall.

"Oh, no -- " Panic quickly filled Kerrin's throat.

"In here." With uncanny instinct, Gary pushed open the very door that led to Kerrin's private domain. He tugged her inside after himself and closed the door.

She was alone in her bedroom with Gary Sullivan.

But whatever implications and terrifying possibilities that brought to Kerrin's mind didn't seem to occur to Gary. He pushed her into a sitting position on the edge of the lace-covered bed. Flapping the paycheck envelope in front of her face he asked, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?"

Kerrin dropped her eyes from his furious gaze and regarded the flapping envelope. "Matt's suggestion wasn't bad. Why don't you put it in the bank?"

Making an indistinguishable noise, Gary threw the envelope on the bed beside her and turned away. He glared at her delicately patterned wallpaper while rubbing the back of his neck.